Advancements in semiconductor technology have enabled functional components of a computer or electronic system to be integrated and designed as a system-on-a-chip (SOC) device. In an SOC device, components traditionally manufactured as separate chips such as microprocessors, microcontrollers, data converters, signal processors, memory, and various interfaces, for example, may be embedded into a standalone system on a single chip. The functional units of the SOC device may be designed to communicate internally with each other over an on-chip bus, as well as to communicate with one or more external or off-chip components, such as an off-chip dynamic random access memory (DRAM).
An SOC device may be programmed to perform one or more networking, multimedia, and/or communications applications for personal a computer (PC), consumer electronics (CE), and/or mobile platform. When performing such applications, the SOC device may be required to provide certain security measures in order to protect data against hacking or other unauthorized use in compliance with various regulatory requirements and quality standards. While current security implementations provide tamper-resistant code and other mechanisms to protect data when transferred to and from an external memory, such as an off-chip DRAM, such implementations do not provide on-chip datapath security for an SOC device.